John 6:51-58 (NRSV)
Read John 6:51-58 on biblegateway.com
Verse 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." Verse 52The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" Verse 53So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Verse 54Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; Verse 55for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Verse 56Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Verse 57Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. Verse 58This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever."
Devotion
Each of the sacraments has something seemingly revolting about it: baptism’s watery grave, the appalling injustice of absolution, the unhandy cannibalism of communion. We Christians are a funky bunch, and it is not too hard to see why we can gross out the Unitarians and make our Muslim brothers and sisters so uncomfortable.
What keeps us from becoming a strange sect of vampires, however, is the move Jesus makes into the world. “…The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Here, power is outpoured with an endless and reckless confidence—the self-giving spread of life over death.
One of my mentors, the artist Ernst Schwidder, painted a crucifixion in which Christ’s body was a dandelion puffball disintegrating in the wind against the cross, and falling, God-knows-where, into the soil. So it is with us, we who have the audacity to count ourselves members of Christ’s body: outpoured, given, planted, spread.
Prayer
Christ, your giving knows no ending. Root us in the rich reality of your hurting and hungry world. Make us people worth having as neighbors. Amen.